Post Studio

Presentation by Kat O’Keeffe

May 11 2011

Post Studio art What is “Post Studio art”?

Nicolas Bourriaud “Relational Aesthetics” (1998) in which he sets out a different role for the artist as a facilitator for human relationships

Examples of artists who he considers exemplify the genre

His proposal that postmodernism is dead in “Altermoderne” (2009)

Finally, a look at the work of Gabriel Orozco (who had a major exhibition at Tate Modern earlier this year)

Robert Smithson (1938-73)

He was the first artist whose work attracted the title of “Post Studio”. He is one of the founders of the art movement called “Land Art”

He is most famous for his work “Spiral Jetty” (1970) in Great Salt Lake Utah

Smithson was an influential sculptor who took art out of the gallery and into the world

Robert Smithson

Lawrence Alloway (1926-90) the English art critic who coined the term “Pop Art”, used the title “Post Studio” about Smithson’s sculptures as they used natural land forms instead of traditional materials

He wrote about this new art form in the essay “Site/Nonsite” in 1981……

“he explicitly aligns geological change with the process of our thought…. landscape then becomes analogous to the human condition or at least of our communications”

Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965)

A French art critic, philosopher and curator, he is best known among English speakers for his book “Relational Aesthetics” published in 1998 (English version 2002)

It has come to be seen as the defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s

Bourriaud coined the term in 1995 in a text for the catalogue for the exhibition “Traffic” shown in Bordeaux

Main ideas in Relational Aesthetics

The idea of the artist working outside the normal confines of a studio, like Robert Smithson, is central to his ideas. He sees the artist as not confined by gallery walls and he believes art can be found everywhere…

He goes much further by completely redefining the modern artist as:

“An entrepreneur/politician/director. The common denominator shared by all artists is that they show something. The act of showing suffices to define the artist, be it representation or designation”

Main ideas in Relational Aesthetics

He also defines art in the book as:

Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms actions and objects”

Main ideas in Relational Aesthetics

The art critic Claire Bishop writing in “Installation Art” says“Relational art is seen as a direct response to the shift from a goods to a service based economy in the 1980s and 1990s. It is also seen as a response to the virtual world of the internet and globalisation, which on the one hand have prompted a desire for more physical and face to face interaction while on the other inspiring artists to create their own version of the universe”

“The relationships between people as symbolised by goods or replaced by them and signposted by logos have to take on extreme and clandestine forms if they are to dodge the empire of predictability” (Nicholas Bouillard “Relational Aesthetics)

Main ideas in Relational Aesthetics

Bouillard sees art in the 1990s as a means of overcoming the programmed relationships caused by a powerful media. He sees the role of the artist as bringing people together to interact socially in new and meaningful relationshipsHe defines “Relational Art” as:

“A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical points of departure

the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private

space”He sees Relational Aesthetics as:

“Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations

which they represent, produce or prompt”

Main ideas in Relational Aesthetics

Bouillard feels art should be a model of sociability and should lead to this question

“Does this work permit me to enter into a dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?”He sees the space in which this dialogue takes place as of great importance to the artist:

“Art too is made up of chaotic chance meetings of signs and forms. Nowadays it even creates spaces within which the encounter can occur. Present day art does not present the outcome of a labour, it is the labour itself, or the labour to be.”

Main ideas in Relational Aesthetics Bouillard provides this definition of modern art as he sees it:

“Every artist whose work stems from relational aesthetics, has a world of forms, a set of problems and a trajectory which are all his own. They are not connected by any style, theme or iconography. What they do share together is much more decisive, to wit, the fact of operating within one and the same practical and theoretical horizon: the sphere of inter human relations. Their works involve methods of social exchanges, interactivity with the viewer within the aesthetic”

Some artists who exemplify thisBouillard regards Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) as an exemplary artist in terms of “relational aesthetics”. He died of AIDs and much of his work is inspired by his partner Ross who died of the same illness some years before

He was a Cuban/American artist who said of his work

“I need the viewer, I need the public interaction. Without a public these works are nothing, nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work to join in”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

In Untitled (Placebo) (1991) one thousand pounds of identical silver-cellophane wrapped sweets are laid out in the shape of a long rectangle on the gallery floor. The audience is invited to help themselves to a sweet and the piece gradually disappears over the course of the exhibition.

The artist said of the work:“I am giving you this sugary thing; you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else’s body. And in this way, my work becomes part of so many other people’s bodies…..For just a few seconds, I have put something sweet into someone’s mouth and that is very sexy”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

A similar work is “Portrait of Ross”. The work signifies thewasting away from Aids of Ross, his partner. His doctor set his ideal weight at 175 lbs when he was diagnosed and the candy Spills weigh exactly that. Viewers took the candy and at the end of each day the pile of sweets wasweighed and restored to the original weight

It could be that the artist was showing the power of the human spirit that is able to replenish itself despite great suffering

In this is an example of Gonzalez-Torres’ work that the process of creating it, is as important as the product itself. The work can never be finished as its purpose it torecreate itself with interaction from others

Felix Gonzalez-TorresNicolas Bourriaud likes the flexibility inherent in works of art like those of Gonzalez-Torres. He says in his book Relational Aesthetics of the exhibition “Traffic”“..each artist was at leisure to do what he/she wanted throughout the exhibition, to alter the piece, replace it or propose performances or events. ….The visitor here had a crucial place, because his interaction with the works helped define the exhibition’s structure. …In Gonzalez-Torres’ piles of sweets, for example, the visitor was authorised to take away something from the piece….The artist thus appealed to the visitor’s sense of responsibility”

Rirkrit Tiravanija (born 1961)

Rirkrit Tiravanija is mentioned many time in Bourriaud’s book. He is one of the most influential artists working today in Relational artHe was born in Buenos Aries to Thai parents, raised in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada. This global influence in clear in his work where he uses food from around the world in many of his exhibitionsThe phrase “lots of people” appears in his list of materials for each piece, indicating that the viewer’s participation is crucialHe often cooks curries for visitors and the detritus of cooking vessels and food packets become the exhibition when the artist isn’t thereAs an artist he seeks to set up “literal relationships” between the visitors to his work and this active participation is seen as of more value than the detached contemplation more usually associated with looking at an artwork

Rirkrit Tiravanija- examples of his work

Untitled 2002 (The Raw and the Uncooked)

The artist cooking at his exhibitions

Untitled 2003 (Less oil more courage)

Untitled (Aisle Flottant2010

Soup Kitchen at anexhibition

Rirkrit Tiravanija In his first major exhibition in called Untitled (Still) in

1992 in New York, he moved everything he found in the gallery office and storeroom into the main exhibition space, including the director who was obliged to work in public.

He did this again in 1997 in Germany when he built a wooden reconstruction of his apartment in New York that was open to the public 24 hours. People used the kitchen to make food, washed in the bathroom, slept in the bedroom and socialised in the living space

Several critics and the artist himself have commented that this involvement of the audience and the fostering or relationships between them is the main focus of his work

Bouillaud on Rirkkrit TirivanijaThe critic asks the question in his book “What would the collector gain by buying one of his pieces of art?”

“What has one bought when one owns a work by Tirivanija, other than a relationship with the world rendered concrete by an object, which per se, defines the relations one has towards this relationship: the relation to a relationship”

Nicolas Bouillaud – Altermodern The critic moved his ideas on in the Tate

Triennial Exhibition called “Altermodern” in 2009

Here he is talking about his view of art after modernism and postmodernism which he calls “Altermodern”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqHMILrKpDY

Nicolas Bouillaud on Altermodern He feels we need a new term for the art of today Significantly, globalisation and travel mean we

have many diverse cultural references to draw on in our interpretation of the world, in particular, not just western culture

Through technology we are surrounded by many different visual signs and ways of experiencing our world and art should reflect this

He likens the artist to a contemporary traveller who wanders nomadically through a universe that is more easily accessible than ever before and has fewer boundaries

Ruth Ewan (b. Aberdeen 1981)

ori Ruth Ewan’s “Squeeze Box JukeBox” 2009. Using Giancarlo Francenella’s Giant Accordian, everyday 2 people were invitedto play a song from the archive of40 songs.

The songs included historical protest songs like theCutty Wren attributed to thePeasants’ Revolt of 1381

The archive was called “A Jukebox of people trying to save the world”

Bob and Roberta Smith (b. 1963 London)

Pseudonym for the artist Patrick Brill this piece calledOffVoice Fly Tip (2009) consisted of a continually changing installation of hand painted signs and posters, intespersed with playful items like discarded children’s tricycles.

The text on the posters were all snippets of conversations the artist had with Nicolas Bouillaud over the 12 days of the exhibition

Lindsay Seers (b.1978 London)In Lindsay Seers moving video documentary of her life, we are told by several narrators of the artist becoming the camera and later becoming the projector. These two becomings involve Lindsay placing a film in her mouth to form an image or strapping a projection device to her head to project light out into the world

Marcus Coates (b. 1968 England) In “Firebird Rhebok Badger and

Hare” (2008) the artist Marcus Coates shows a film of himself dressed in a blue and white tracksuit (colours of the Israeli flag) with a badger’s head and a stuffed rabbit sticking out of his shirt.

He visits the mayor of a small town in Israel and listens with an interpreter while Coates acts an intermediary between the animal and human worlds making animal noises and then delivering a lecture about vulnerable birds that is analagous to countries

What does it all mean?

Richard Dorment art critic for the Daily Telegraph describes the experience as:

“..the art at the Triennial is open ended, formless and refers to something outside itself. Walking through the show is like spending a few hours aimlessly surfing the net. A seemingly endless stream of politics, porn, science fiction, history culture and science flows past you so fast when you leave it is hard to say where you have been.”

Gabriel Ozorca (b. 1962 in Mexico)

He is a Mexican artist who has been spoken of as one of the most influential artists of this decade. He uses a very wide variety of media including videos, drawing, photographs, installations and sculptures. He makes relationships between objects that are often ignored. His work encourages interaction between the audience and the artwork

Gabriel Ozorca Here is the artist talking about his work

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gabrielorozco/default.shtm